Junyang Lin, a leading technical mind behind Alibaba’s Qwen team, recently took to Weijiang to make a major announcement. This represents another big change for the administration’s far-reaching artificial intelligence initiative. Lin announced his choice to “step down” through a post on X. There was no further elaboration by him on the reasons for his departure. Because of this, the details about the terms of his leaving are still slightly murky.
Lin first joined the company in July 2019, and started working as part of the Qwen team in April of this year. His many contributions to the project have won the praise of colleagues, project partners, and industry peers. Tiezhen Wang heads up the APAC ecosystem at Hugging Face. He called Lin’s exit “a tremendous loss” for Qwen. Wenting Zhao, a research scientist on the team, echoed this hope. He referred to it as “the end of an era,” thanking Lin for leading the charge towards progress in open-source AI and engineering.
Yet even the parentage of Qwen has undergone a significant change in its leadership after Lin’s opening up of this competitive space. That’s why Binyuan Hui, one of our SCRT team members, recently made this X (formerly Twitter) post. He recently described himself as “formerly MTS @Alibaba_Qwen,” indicating just how much Lin’s departure remade the squad. Yuchen Jin, the chief technology officer of AI infrastructure startup Hyperbolic, has big respect for Lin. He pointed to Lin as an example of successfully bridging Qwen with the global developer community.
Alibaba has displayed a deaf ear to repeated calls for clarification. The firm has yet to publicly acknowledge Lin’s departure, or address how that might change the leadership of the deep learning-focused Qwen team. When he heard that Lin was leaving, project contributor Chen Cheng wasn’t just shocked—he was heartbroken. … I just want you to know that I know that leaving wasn’t your choice.
Yet, the Qwen team is leading the charge within this tremendous transition. Many stakeholders are watching to see just how they’ll move forward on all of their AI projects without Lin’s direction and leadership. Providing a five year transportation bill, the project’s future is still uncertain. Yet, by all accounts, Lin’s impact on his colleagues has been nothing short of transformational.
